The Devil's Cave: A Bruno Courrèges Investigation (Bruno Chief of Police 5)

each cheek.
    He sat down and studied her, then ordered another croissant for Isabelle, insisting she needed a little more flesh on her bones and a lot more Périgord cooking. J-J was probably one of the few men she’d heed, Bruno thought; it was like watching a father with a favourite daughter. Bruno shifted the empty plates and cups to a neighbouring table that two sets of visitors were squabbling over and spread out the detailed map that ramblers used, a 1:25,000 scale produced by the Institut Géographique National.
    ‘You can see the sites I’ve marked after the river trip,’ he said. There were four left that he thought worth examining from the land side. Two other sites had been checked by Antoine with the local watermen and pronounced clear.
    ‘I’d never realized those bends in the river were so big,’ Isabelle said. ‘You don’t get a sense of that on the roads.’
    ‘The roads can’t follow the river line because of the cliffs,’ said J-J. ‘Remember that case of the kid who drowned up near Montignac, Bruno? Must be seven or eight years ago. We used helicopters as well as boats trying to find him. You couldn’t get down from the roads.’
    He reached into his briefcase. ‘By the way, I’ve got the final autopsy report.’ He put it on the table, turning by habit to the final page where the conclusions were listed.
    The woman had been very drunk, with 1.9 grams of alcohol per litre of blood, which was more than three times the legal limit for driving. She’d had the equivalent of more than a bottle of wine, Bruno calculated. He’d have to check how much that meant from the vodka bottle. She had evidently taken temazepam, but less than half a gram. This was not usually fatal even when mixed with alcohol. But she’d also been a habitual cocaine user.
    ‘A busy girl,’ said Isabelle, thumbing through the report to the section on the woman’s sexual activity. Bruno still got slightly embarrassed discussing such matters with a woman, even a former lover. He noticed that J-J stayed silent. He took the report from Isabelle and looked first for the reference to the object Dr Gelletreau had taken from the woman’s vagina. It was listed as ‘unidentified flour-based disc, possibly bread’.He’d have to talk to the pathologist directly. Then he looked for the estimated time of death.
    ‘Time of death before midnight and no evening meal,’ Bruno said aloud. ‘So the alcohol and drugs would have been more potent.’
    He read on, noting that only her prints had been found on the bottle of Smirnoff vodka. She had given birth more than a decade earlier. Her teeth had been capped cosmetically in a resin characteristic of American dentistry; French dentists preferred porcelain. But from the TB vaccination scar on an upper arm, she was almost certainly European by birth; American doctors used a different technique. Her lungs showed she had been a heavy smoker and her liver showed years of alcohol abuse.
    ‘A suicide, not much question about it,’ said J-J, his tone of voice suggesting he’d been brought on a wild goose chase.
    ‘I might agree, except for all the other stuff,’ said Bruno. ‘Did she paint that pentagram on herself? Did she set fire to the boat before taking her last slug of vodka? If so, where’s the lighter or the matches? Did she cut the cockerel’s head off? If so, where’s the knife? Where’s the container for the tranquillizers?’
    ‘It’s not only that,’ Isabelle said, glancing at the nearby tables and keeping her voice down. ‘Where did she leave her clothes? Who were the guys she was having sex with? Did they not notice she suddenly left? Why did they not report her missing? And an evening of sex and drugs is not the usual prelude to a suicide.’
    She turned to Bruno. ‘I’m sure you’ll have checked missingpersons, but with that dentistry, did you check the American consulate?’
    ‘Any report from them or any other foreign embassy gets on the missing persons list as a matter of course,’ said J-J.
    ‘What if she’s not formally missing yet, just some questions raised about where she might be?’ Isabelle said. ‘It’s worth a call.’
    ‘She was a striking woman,’ said Bruno. ‘It’s not a face that people would be likely to forget.’ He put a photograph on the table. The pathologist had patched up the damage to her eye, cleaned her up and done something deft with cosmetics before taking the picture. She still looked dead, but as if a